Inflation saint

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Ludwig Christian Haeusser
Muck-Lamberty
Leonard Stark

As inflation Saints a diverse group of men is called after 1945, known in her time as a "walking saint," "Nature" or "Nature prophets", and especially during the great inflation of the 1920s made their appearance beginning. They called themselves “Brothers” (Johannes Guttzeit), “Christian Revolutionaries” ( Alfred Daniel ), “Christian Socialists” (Max Schulze-Sölde) or “Bandits of the World Tour Association” (Gusto Gräser). It was about a new religious awakening movement, which wanted to spread a contemporary worldview for the modern with primeval Christian unconditionality.

General

In the Weimar Republic , apocalyptic groups and cults experienced a boom in Germany , especially during the inflation . Der Spiegel named them in an article on the subject of "rag prophets on the Jesus trip, itinerant preachers of the 'revolution from within', gurus of the cult of the ego and the longing for the leader, right and left 'mutants of the Hitler type'". The permanent economic and political crisis after the lost First World War formed the breeding ground for salvation and awakening movements, through which the petty bourgeoisie in particular promised new meaning and a new spiritual order. “When the revolutionaries were slain, sat in prison or resigned, the hour of the traveling prophets struck. When the external revolution came to an end, it found its continuation in the consciousness revolution, in a spiritual turn, ”said the historian Ulrich Linse .

In the case of the inflation saints, this “spiritual” inner development was the focus. The goal was the rule of the soul over matter. Thereby religious and enthusiastic traits combined with hostility towards civilization and diffuse revolutionary social criticism. Politically there were links to both the anarchist movement and right-wing ethnic groups . Particularly noticeable was the common expectation of the followers of these “prophets” of a “messiah” , as was also observed in politics in those years - for example in the stylization of Adolf Hitler as the “savior” of Germany.

The forerunners of the so-called inflation saints were the “nature prophet” Gusto Gräser , whose municipality Monte Verità near Ascona was one of the most important centers of the movement, Gustaf Nagel and the Dada artist Johannes Baader . Among their best-known representatives were the “Redeemer of Mankind” Ludwig Christian Haeusser , who also participated several times (unsuccessfully) in elections with his Haeusser Bund , and the “Messiah of Thuringia” Friedrich Muck-Lamberty with his group “Junge Schar”. Furthermore, the "Johannes der Jugend" Max Schulze-Sölde , the "Savior from Horeb" Emil Leibold , Theodor Plievier ("Aktion Weltwende"), Otto "Christ" Suhr and the Haeusser successors Leonhard Stark and Franz Kaiser . An important forum for the inflation saints was the Christian Revolutionary Collection Movement of the naturopathic and reformist pioneer Karl Strünckmann .

When inflation subsided in 1924, the movement lost its foundation. Due to their focus on the self and the glorification of sheer actionism ("the deed"), the inflation saints failed to provide meaningful solutions to the problems of the present day. This inevitably led to political ineffectiveness and thus to the disappointment of their supporters and sectarianism. Many of the preachers - such as Plievier and Muck-Lamberty - withdrew into the bourgeoisie, Emil Leibold became a federal railway official after 1945, Suhr a sewing machine representative. Others ended up in the madhouse or by suicide (so Anton Graf and the self-proclaimed "Eva" Emma Ott ). "Gottkaiser" Haeusser died in 1927 after a long prison term.

During the Depression of the early 1930s, the movement experienced a brief renaissance with increased contacts to the “völkisch scene” and parts of the National Socialist Party . After the end of the Second World War , despite tentative attempts, there was no revival of the movement. But in the 1950s - albeit under completely different sociological conditions - there was also a kind of “wave of preachers”, of which Father Johannes Leppich was the most famous representative .

Sociological classification

In terms of their origins and profession, the inflation saints were by no means a homogeneous group: the spectrum ranged from vegetarian nature enthusiasts, young people and globetrotters to unemployed proletarians, from Dadaist happening artists to former entrepreneurs and economic fraudsters. But they knew each other and worked together in every conceivable constellation. Envy and competition thoughts were far from the most, although the common basis of their teachings of the faith in the own "I" and a resulting megalomania and desire for egomaniac was self-expression. In their self-image this meant: The further one had come in one's own spiritual development, the greater the desire to become one's own “God”. In this sense, Haeusser's traditional battle cry is to be understood: “I want to become a master, not master of people, but of myself!” In particular, the apostolic environment of the “Haeusser League” became a real breeding furnace for ever newer “saints”.

Origin and use of terms

The use of the term “inflation saints” has not been established for the early 1920s. In contemporary publications they are usually referred to as “itinerant preachers” or “saints”, a generic term that was still generally present due to the similarly named movement of life reform preachers between 1880 and the First World War (the so-called “kohlrabi apostles”). It is assumed that the term “inflation saint” like that of the “kohlrabi apostle” originated from the people and was initially used with derogatory intent. In the 1950s, the writer Theodor Plievier - himself a former "inflation saint" - used the term for the first time as a factually neutral designation. From the beginning of the 1980s, the term - based on the publications of the historian Ulrich Linse - was adopted as a technical term for this temporally and spatially precisely delimited form of the traveling preacher phenomenon in historical, social and theological research and teaching.

Audio

Literary processing

“... immediately after the end of the great war, our country was full of saviors, prophets and disciples, of premonitions of the end of the world or hopes for the dawn of a Third Reich. Shaken by the war, desperate by hardship and hunger, deeply disappointed by the apparent uselessness of all the sacrifices made to blood and property, our people were open to some phantasms at that time, but also to some real elevations of the soul. "

- Hermann Hesse : Morgenlandfahrt
  • In his story Morgenlandfahrt , published in 1932, Hermann Hesse u. a. his friend and itinerant preacher Gusto Gräser and describes the procession of the "new crowd" of Muck-Lamberty through northern Bavaria and Thuringia in 1920.
  • Hugo Hartung has also incorporated the train of the "new crowd" in his novels Aber Anne was called Marie (Berlin 1952) and The silent adventures (Berlin 1963).
  • In the book In the Blue Car Through Germany (Berlin / Leipzig 1926) Lisa Tetzner describes the migration of the "New Group" from her perspective as a participant.
  • In his memoirs Via vitae (Kassel 1968) the theologian Wilhelm Stählin describes his encounter with Muck-Lamberty .
  • Muck-Lamberty also plays a role in Walter Kramer's (1892–1956) novel Dammed Flood (Stuttgart / Berlin 1941) .
  • In the figure of Daniel zur Höhe in Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus (1947), the inflation saints and the circle around Stefan George were processed.
  • The church-critical writer Hermann Stehr built Louis Haeusser in his novel Droben Gnade Drunten Recht. The sex of the Maechler (Leipzig 1944) one.
  • In his autobiographical novel Untermenschen (Copenhagen 1933), written in exile , Walter Kolbenhoff lets his main characters in Berlin discuss inflation saints and especially Haeussers .
  • Käthe Kollwitz noted the impressions that Theodor Plievier made on her as a “saint” in her diaries ( I saw the world with loving glances , Wiesbaden no year).
  • The writer and national Bolshevik Ernst Niekisch describes his memories of alleged “redeemers” like the inflation saint and Adolf Hitler in Daring Life. Encounters and experiences (Cologne / Berlin 1958).
  • Otto Buchinger , a friend of Johannes Baader , reports in From the marine doctor to the fasting doctor. Metamorphoses of a wanderer (Freiburg, Hyperion 1955) from the contacts of the DADA scene with grasses and the Haeusser circle.
  • Georg K. Glaser reports on an appearance by the “savior of the poor” Karl Wassmann in his main work, Mystery and Violence (1951, etc.).

literature

  • Hugo Efferoth: Heaven Fimmel. A study on the cult epidemic of the present . 2nd edition, Publishing House for Proletarian Freethinkers in Germany, Dresden 1923.
  • Max Schulze-Sölde: A person of that time . Urquell-Verlag, Flarchheim in Thuringia 1930.
  • Ulrich Linse: Wandering Prophet of the Twenties . in: Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo . Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1982, pp. 191-208, ISBN 3-88725-070-2 .
  • Ulrich Linse: Barefoot prophets. Savior of the twenties . Siedler-Verlag, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-88680-088-1 .
  • Daniel Megerle: Ludwig Christian Haeusser and the movement of the inflation saints (ZupfgeigenHefte) o. O. o. J., on March 12, 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barefoot for deliverance from chaos . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1984, pp. 170-177 ( Online - Feb. 6, 1984 ).
  2. ↑ Ulrich Linse: Wandering Prophets of the Twenties , in: Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo . Berlin 1982, p. 191
  3. ↑ Ulrich Linse: Wandering Prophets of the Twenties , in: Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo . Berlin 1982, p. 193ff .; see also Gregor Dobler: 'Inflation Saints' - Prophets in the Context of the Alternative Movements of the Twenties in Germany , Uni Bayreuth, SS 2001 (manuscript)
  4. ↑ so with Max Schulze-Sölde and Friedrich Muck-Lamberty ; see also Ulrich Linse: Barefoot Prophets. Savior of the twenties . Berlin 1983, p. 44ff.
  5. ↑ Ulrich Linse: Barefoot Prophets. Savior of the twenties . Berlin 1983, p. 38ff .; Daniel Megerle: Ludwig Christian Haeusser and the movement of the inflation saints (ZupfgeigenHefte) o. O. o. J .; see. Carl Christian Bry : The Hitler Putsch , Nördlingen 1987, p. 64 (article of November 22, 1922); Friedrich Heer : The Faith of Adolf Hitler. Anatomy of a political religiosity , Frankfurt / M., Berlin, Vienna 1989
  6. ↑ not to be confused with the politician of the same name
  7. ↑ s. Daniel Megerle: Ludwig Christian Haeusser and the movement of the inflation saints (ZupfgeigenHefte) o. O. o. J .; Ulrich Linse: Wandering Prophet of the Twenties , in: Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo . Berlin 1982, p. 206ff .; Ulrich Linse: Barefoot prophets. Savior of the twenties . Berlin 1983, pp. 50ff., 234ff.
  8. ↑ Ulrich Linse: Barefoot Prophets. Savior of the twenties . Berlin 1983, p. 126ff., 149ff .; Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf : National Bolshevism in Germany. 1918-1933 . Frankfurt / M., Berlin, Vienna 1972, p. 329
  9. ↑ Ulrich Linse: Barefoot Prophets. Savior of the twenties . Berlin 1983, pp. 53, 64ff. u.ö .; see. the psychiatric examinations of individual inflation saints : Eduard Reiss : On formal personality change as a result of changed milieu conditions , in: Zschr fd Gesamt Neurologie und Psychiatrie 70 (1921), pp. 55–92 (Haeusser); Patient file Ludwig Haeusser (1923), Langenhagen Mental Hospital, No. 5896 (Hannover City Archives); Observation file Leonard Stark (1922), Neurosurgery District Upper Palatinate (Archive District Hospital Regensburg )
  10. ↑ cit. in Ulrich Linse: Wandering Prophet of the Twenties , in: Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo . Berlin 1982, p. 196
  11. ↑ s. Harry Wilde: Theodor Plievier. Zero point of freedom . Munich u. a. 1965
  12. ↑ s. Literature and lens: The inflation saint Lou Haeusser , in: Stuttgart in the Third Reich. The seizure of power . Stuttgart 1983
  13. ↑ first by the historian Hagen Schulze in: Gesellschaftskrise und Narrenparadies , in: Linse 1983, pp. 9–21; see also the work of the cultural scientist Hanne Bergius: Das Lachen DADAs , Giessen 1989; of the Hamburg historian Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : Man for man . Hamburg 1998; Verena Freyschmidt, Max Schulze-Sölde and the saints of inflation ( historical seminar paper, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf 2004); the course of the ethnologist Gregor Dobler: 'Inflation Saints' - Prophets in the Context of the Alternative Movements of the Twenties in Germany , Uni Bayreuth, SS 2001